James Wanless

Customizing menus and widgets for my new WordPress theme

I have a history of somewhat routinely tweaking or fully redesigning my theme, but it’s usually just a matter of moving some elements around, changing a colour here and there and calling it a day. With the release of WordPress 3.0, I took a slightly different approach this time. This release brings with it some major changes and I decided to begin digging into WordPress a little more deeply than I usually do this time.

In particular, I decided it was high time I really began grokking widgets to a degree I hadn’t before and I was determined that the new WordPress menu system would be my friend. This meant a different approach to the usual. I’ve built a number of sites with WordPress where I presently work, and for clients in the past.  As we move more deeply into WordPress for blogs and other projects at BCIT, I felt that leveraging the platform’s features for my personal use would be useful.

Simple menus – different mindset

I’ve always written custom menu code in the past. For the most part, I did this because I could ensure that I maintained states for styling on families of pages and I could include exactly what I wanted to in various areas of page real estate.  However, I’ve always been bothered by this to some degree because, once I’ve finished designing a theme, I’m still opening up my code editor and FTP-ing something or other to the server as I make a tweak here and a tweak there, as opposed to simply updating my site through the admin panel.

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August 22nd, 2010 :: design, technology :: 10 comments